Thoughts on Company Culture & Values
Lately I’m thinking a lot about company culture, company values and how to achieve them. It’s one of the most important tasks as a founder and it’s very easy to screw it up.
Achieving great company culture is more than just putting an expensive espresso machine and a ping pong table into your office or buy every employee a new iPhone or a MacBook Pro. A great workplace emerges through great colleagues. It’s continuous team work and an ongoing process, it’s not created by a single person. The company culture defines how colleagues work together, treat each other and how they communicate.
Company Values help us to
- identify qualities we value in our colleagues.
- define what we as a company stand for.
- communicate with colleagues.
- communicate the purpose of our mission and our work within the team.
- communicate our mission to customers and the outside world.
- decide which people we are going to hire.
- decide which people we are going to promote.
- decide which feedback and features we are going to implement and which opportunities we pass on.
Even though we are still a small team, creating the best possible environment for our colleagues is a very important goal for us and something every company and startup should focus very early on. Our first employees are the base of our company and the people which will determine our company culture.
That’s why we are currently putting together our Company Values in a written document.
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